Presently businesses that have FAX machines have them connected to telephone lines whose only use is for transmitting and receiving letters, drawings, and similar material. This results in the FAX telephone line being unused a considerable portion of the day.
There are also times when individuals or offices wish to transmit a complete diskette or certain files from their diskettes to a person located remotely from the person sending that data. With use of applicant's novel free standing data transfer device, it is possible for the user to transmit complete diskettes or files from diskettes over the same telephone line that has been set aside specifically for FAX communications.
It is an object of the invention to provide a novel system for transmitting binary data, picture data, or text data from a computer floppy disk or other storage medium.
It is also an object of the invention to provide a novel free standing data transfer device that is compatible with existing FAX machines so that the data transfer device can be connected in series with a FAX machine.
It is another object of the invention to provide a novel free standing data transfer device that allows the telephone line devoted to the FAX machine to have a multiple purpose.
Currently the only way to remotely transfer computer files is by using two computers, connected to two modems, each connected to a telephone line. This configuration poses no problem to the sending party, however, it is a major problem to the receiving party for the following reasons:
The receiving party's computer must be turned on
A modem must be connected to the computer and turned on
The modem must be able to handle the proper transmission speed (baud rate)
A communications software program must be loaded into the computer's memory and be set to "wait" for a phone call
Certain switches in the communications software must be properly set (baud rate, parity, stop bits etc.)
There must be enough disk space available to successfully transfer the file
Also, once a person has established communication with a remote computer, they often have the ability to browse into areas where sensitive or secret material might be kept.
Additionally, in order for an office to have a computer dedicated to sending and receiving data files, there would need to be a substantial investment in the basic computer equipment. Plus the communications equipment, plus the additional phone line, plus the training involved in showing someone how to handle a system or power failure.
Therefore, if a device could be made available that was designed to share the phone line already dedicated to the FAX, was properly set to receive a transmission as soon as it was turned on, required virtually no training for it's basic functions, gave the user countless options for both sending and receiving data, and was cost effective, then data file transmissions would become more common place therefore lowering a company's "overnight mail" costs, allowing the data to arrive almost immediately, eliminate the need to re-key information into another computer, and offer the receiving party different options for either storing or printing the information.